After announcing an IPO in February, today Dropbox updated its S-1 filing with pricing. The cloud services and storage company said that it expects to price its IPO at between
$16 and $18 per share when it sells 36,000,000 shares to raise $648 million as “DBX” on the Nasdaq exchange.
[ Tech Crunch ]

John Oliver is known for his eloquent explanations of complex topics like net neutrality. Now, he’s turning his attention to the internet’s favorite topic of the moment: Bitcoin. It’s “everything you don’t understand about money combined with everything you don’t understand about computers,” quips Oliver, correctly. [ The Verge ]

GV partner Lo Toney is looking to raise up to $50 million for his new fund, Plexo Capital, Axios first reported. Since 2017, Toney has been incubating Plexo Capital inside GV, formerly known as Google Ventures. The idea with Plexo Capital, which is backed by Alphabet, is to invest as a limited partner in seed funds led by people of color and/or female general partners, Toney said in an interview back in 2017 with Family Office Insights.

There are very few
black and Latinx investors, with only 2 percent of investment team members at VC firms identifying as black and just 1 percent identifying as Latinx, according to the National Venture Capital Association. Meanwhile, just 12 percent of investment professionals are women, according to Kapor Center for Social Impact’s latest report. [ TechCrunch ]

When And Why Having An MBA Matters For Startup Investors

In a recent exploration of the educational backgrounds of professional venture capital investors for Crunchbase News, here’s what we found:

Investment partners at VC firms, themselves a small and exclusive coterie, tend to call an equally tight-knit group of colleges their alma mater. In a finding that will shock almost nobody, Ivy League and
Ivy-Plus schools are heavily favored in the top rankings.

73 percent of the investment partners had some sort of graduate education. An impressive 16 percent of the population we analyzed held an MD, PhD, or equivalent doctoral degree.

By just the barest margin, a majority (51 percent) of the investment partners in our dataset held an MBA. [ CrunchBase ]

How this Singapore-based investor bought into Uber, Spotify, Alibaba, and other tech giants

K2 Global has been investing in startups since 2015, but the venture capital fund and its founder, Ozi Amanat, are seldom in the news. Singapore-based Amanat has been in the game for a decade or so. During that time, he’s been able to get into the cap tables of some of the most prominent tech companies in the world, ranging from Uber, Airbnb, Spotify, and Palantir to Alibaba and Paytm. He’s gathered support from high-profile limited partners, family offices, and investors. And he’s done it largely as a “one-man band,” as he puts it. [ Tech In Asia ]

VCs have discovered the Midwest

The Midwest is back! At least, that’s the conclusion from a group of venture capitalists who went on a multi-day bus tour through the region recently. As Kevin Roose wrote in the New York Times this week, “The trip, which took place on a luxury bus outfitted with a supply of vegan doughnuts and coal-infused kombucha, was known as the ‘Comeback Cities Tour.” [ TechCrunch ]

Kevin’s Week in Tech: Is Silicon Valley Really Over?

Bose is carving out $50 million for startups using its new audio-focused AR tech

Kobalt Invests $150 Million in its AWAL Recorded-Music Operation

Simply SaaS Meetup with Viviana Faga

Viviana Faga is an Operating Partner at Emergence Capital. She has more than 15 years of experience designing and building brand categories for companies like Salesforce, Yammer, Platfora, and Zenefits. Viviana is a go-to-market expert, and continues to help create scalable growth engines that drive successful exits. She joined us early in the morning for our Simply SaaS Meetup with 30+ entrepreneurs eager to hear more about her journey. [ Atlanta Ventures ]

L.A.'s Bird Hatches $100 Million Funding Round To Take Scooter Service Nationwide

Alibaba’s Jack Ma and Joe Tsai are pumping $20 million into Rent the Runway through their investment firm